Michigan

John Littlejohn prays during the invocation following a march to the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn. on Aug. 28, 2103. About 200 people commemorated the 1963 March on Washington with a march to the Minnesota Capitol, marking the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
(AP Photo/Pioneer Press, John Doman)

So, how did something which seemed so central to my experience slip off so anonymously into the fringes of memory? How did it pass me by?

Here is something I realized this week as we commemorated a half-century’s passing since the 1963 March on Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

I don’t remember it.

I’m not saying it passed without my notice. I’m not saying I was too busy or otherwise occupied. I’m saying I carry no personal recollections of the event. I’m saying I don’t remember remembering.

This is a cold shock to the system. I imagine it would be a little like a war veteran forgetting the day he or she came home from war. It would be like waking up on your 50th anniversary and remembering nothing of your wedding day.

It’s not that I was too young when it happened. I was 11 years old at the time. It was the end of summer, at least as a child experiences summer. I was about to enter the sixth grade, a mark of passage that both intimidated and exhilarated me.

Like every year of childhood but even more than most, that year had been an awakening. I had begun to learn what disillusionment meant. I had begun learning about loss. I was learning that there were greater things to fear than nightmares and fright shows on TV. I was learning how people could disappoint you, even those close to you. Even your heroes tiptoed on feet of clay

I liked to flatter myself that I was well-informed as 11-year-olds go. I knew who Medgar Evers was. I was perfectly aware of the ultimate price he had paid that summer. I knew what had been happening in Birmingham that year.

I had seen children not much older than I was, being led off to jail. I had seen teenagers dancing in the brutal blasts of fire hoses. And in my own limited social consciousness, I had even begun to make some tenuous connections between my life in Michigan and what was happening in Alabama.

So, how did something which seemed so central to my experience slip off so anonymously into the fringes of memory? How did it pass me by?

I’m still not sure it did. Maybe I found occasion to ask my mother what she thought about the march. Maybe I discussed it with siblings and friends. But if I did, shouldn’t I remember? Shouldn’t those talks still be part of me?

Of course, we know the dream wasn’t born that day. King had talked about it on other occasions, including in a speech in Detroit earlier that year. In fact, he had talked about it often enough that people who followed him knew the metaphor. They knew it as intimately as they knew his voice.

“Tell them about the dream, Martin,” the irrepressible gospel singer Mahalia Jackson is said to have called out during King’s delivery of his prepared text. Only then did King cease speechifying. Only then did he start to preach.

But how passionate the sermon, how eloquently stated. No wonder it resonated so deeply with those quarter-million eyewitnesses, who had come to the nation’s capital to demand jobs and freedom. They had brought with them a jagged-shaped experience of racial determinism, and King’s genus was to articulate a dream that completed that experience like a missing puzzle piece.

Besides, King was only articulating the hopes of faceless millions, who had been living poor and dreaming big for generations upon generations. That speech was hundreds of years in the writing.

Now in this age of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, where nothing unhidden can ever be hidden again, both the march and the speech have the ring of familiarity.

Maybe this is how we acknowledge the significance of events that shape us. We talk with eyewitnesses. We read eyewitness accounts. And when we stumble across memories we missed, we manufacture them in hindsight.

And in the end you feel as if you were there, even if you were a young boy at the time, even if you were the better part of a thousand miles away.